I was an at first reluctant user of PowerPoint for lectures but soon discovered that as well as being a presentation device it was a useful stand alone writing tool in terms of providing a format for focussing and organising my thoughts. I now write my lectures by mapping out and organising my slides first and then use them as a structure for my lecture notes. One of the things I like about PP are the slide templates which allow me a variety of instant ways of structuring and presenting my information ie, headings, headings plus bullet points, etc.
I love Scrivener but I find that I don’t really use the index cards as much as I thought: particualrly given the similarities between the way I’ve been working with PP and the corkboard etc. One reason is that I don’t find writing on the index cards as quick and intuitive as I have come to find the PP slides. I wonder whether you would consider providing some basic templates for filling out scrivener index cards along the lines of the ones offered in PP? Similarly, I wonder whether it would be possible to have handout style print out of index cards rather than just those intended for printing index cards?
PS. really love the new software and am already feeling the benefit of many new features
As someone who once played with PowerPoint about fifteen years ago, could you bridge the gap a bit by explaining what it you are looking for in Scrivener without the PowerPoint cross-referencing? For example, what are “slide templates” and how do they make it easier to create bullets?
Index cards in Scrivener are purely a visualisation method for what is otherwise nothing other than an outline structure. They are a different way of viewing a few pieces of information that Scrivener displays otherwise in other contexts, including printable views and such. They are not a separate construct or something that exists in order to create other things—I’m not sure if that is what you mean by “templates” Scrivener does have document templates (See the Project menu for setting these up). They are just documents in a special folder you have set up which can be easily duplicated from the Project menu. They will instantiate anything that has been added to them (except for snapshots), and so could have pre-filled started data in the index cards if you wished. I’m not sure if that is what you mean though.
Thanks so much for your reply. Let me try and explain better what I am getting at.
As I said, I use PP almost as a writing tool in which the slides I create effectively work like index cards. I fill them in and move them around to give me a structure. I can then do a ‘hand out’ style print out which will represent the slides on a page (for example six slides per page). So, when I say PP style templates I mean simply, that when I start writing I click on the icon for a new slide and the blank slide will appear with a configuration of pre-set text boxes ready to be filled in. The configuration of text boxes will depend on what slide template style I have chosen. So, for example, I might have chosen a slide template with a text box for a heading and underneath it a text box with three ready made bullet point slots ready to be filled in. Alternatively, it might be a template with just a heading and sub header, just bullet points with no heading or free text.
Once you get used to working with these templates (and their constraints) it becomes a very quick and intuitive way of putting your ideas down and building a structure. It also replicates the way that people often use index cards on an cork board. That is not writing text along the lines but using a marker pen to put up a word, phrase or a few points.
My desire would be to see a similar way of filling out the index cards in scrivener. Just some simple ready made index card templates with different configurations of text boxes. So, it’s partly a matter of getting to fill out the cards quicker and partly a bolder graphical representation. I understand that this may cause problems when switching into the synopsis view but as with many features on scrivener I imagine different people use different features. I wouldn’t use synopsis because I don’t do that type of writing. I’m more inclined to the analogy used in the scrivener literature of the corkboard with the index card and the more developed text pinned underneath.
Anyway, hope you sort of understand what I’m wittering on about.
Okay, I think I get what you are going for, and I think my original suggestion might do the trick for you. Document templates are a bit like setting up a bunch of preset items in your binder that you can use to prefab new items rapidly. The can be composed of anything—even just index card data if you wish. Try adding a folder called “Templates” to your Research folder, selecting it, and choosing “Set Selection as Template Folder” from the Project menu. The folder will acquire a blue “T” icon. Now anything you put into this folder will get a little blue “T” badge in the corner of it, letting you know it is a template. From there on out you could create new items by either holding down the mouse button on the green “+” icon in the toolbar, or using the [b]Project/New From Template/[/b] sub-menu. Note the first template in this folder gets a hot-key associated with it as well, so put the one you use most often there for rapid scaffolding.
You could put bullets and such into the index card (you’ll need to hold down the Option key in conjunction with Return and Tab to insert those characters), and fill them out as you go along. As for making something like PowerPoint, from what I recall, it isn’t going to be quite the same. Scrivener is too free-form for stuff like a heading box and a bullet box and such. It’s all pretty much just free text, but that doesn’t make it impossible to build your own “pseudo-forms” and filling them out. See some of the character sheet examples in any of the novel fiction templates for a practical example.
So to sum up: making prefabs and filling them out is no problem; 2.0 has you well set up for that. Stuff like “text boxes” and “bullet boxes”—well that doesn’t even exist in Scrivener at all because it is a text stream based application, not a text container based application, so you’ll need to find creative ways to do that using tab stops and such.
Hopefully that answer is somewhat on target.
And hey, if Scrivener doesn’t quite provide what you want for that stage of writing, you should feel free to work in PP up until the point of writing. I’m assuming PP has a way of exporting the text into a format that Scrivener can import into the Binder relatively easy. There are other people who do their early brainstorming in mindmapping programs and such, and step into Scrivener once they are ready to start putting down tens of thousands of words. Use the best tool for the job and for how your brain works, that’s my advice.
Thanks for that I’ll definitely have a go at what you suggest. What you’re describing could have other uses for me so that’s really helpful.
I hear what you’re saying about text boxes. I wonder is there a particular reason why there’s no text formatting in the synopsis/index cards (ie. bold, changing size of fonts, etc)?
I don’t know if this adds to the discussion, but what I found helpful about PP (and now KeyNote) is the ability to set up a slide, and then write my notes directly below, guided by the visual. That way, in the talk I was always referring to elements in the picture, to keep words and images linked.
To add to that workflow Druid, in a Scrivener context, you could achieve an interesting workflow based on this visual/broad-stroke summary in synopsis card or synopsis image by setting a large 1-card width corkboard in a horizontal split above the text view below, with the auto-load button engaged. This way you could scroll through outlining notes you took on the cards, and start writing text in the editor below.
The reason for synopsis being plain text is the same reason for keywords or titles being plain text. They are info fields which are used all over the place in the interface. They were never intended to be rich text editor fields, just basic one or two-liner summaries of the contents of a document, so that document content could be rapidly browsed in a corkboard setting. I think its great that the feature is getting used in such a wide variety of ways, though, eventually you are going to hit limits in the original design constraints, when using a feature for something unintended. Or to put it a better way: it’s not as though the index card is limited to plain-text—it is simply that it isn’t meant to be used to construct elaborately formatting bits of information. In this way, it is no more limited than Photoshop is to embedding QuickTime movies into a picture. To me, it would make more sense to do this kind of work in the main text area or even the notes, but I do see the merit in having it visible at a corkboard level too.
I want to make a template where the page is blank, but the synopsis will have a small amount of text. For every given scene in a novel, I’d like to have 3-4 preset keywords/questions (POV, Goal, Conflict, Setback, etc.) on the Index Card. I don’t want that text on the Document itself. It should remain blank.
I’m not sure I’m entirely following what you want to do, so if this is completely not it maybe you could explain again. Or I could sleep and read it again.
Create a new document in the binder and call it “Templates” (or something more creative, as you choose) and then, while it’s selected, choose Project>Set Selection As Template Folder. Then create a blank document in that folder and set up its index card with your keywords that you want to appear as a template. Now you can at any time create a new document from that index card template via the context menu or Project>New From Template (or the green “add” button or the binder gear button). The top document under the Template folder you created also gets a keyboard shortcut automatically associated with it (opt-shift-cmd-N) to make this even easier, but you can create as many document templates as you like and you can assign your own shortcuts to them as well.
I’m not sure why, but I thought that the templates could only have stuff saved in the document section. I’ve gone through quite a few of the tutorial videos and read the document that came with the download, and never got the info that I could save text solely to the index card/synopsis and have it be a template. It may have been presented, but I didn’t GET it.
I’m glad you cleared that up for me before my trial expired.
Yes, the document templates actually save nearly everything, so not just the body text and the index card text but also keywords, document notes, labels–generally all the meta-data you can put in the inspector. It’s essentially a fast way to duplicate a given document. (Templates don’t include snapshots, though, which a regular “duplicate” command will do–but presumably one wouldn’t want snapshots for a template, and copying them would start generating a lot of unnecessary files.)
